“Virtual tutor”: Alloprof relies on artificial intelligence to help students in Quebec

Alloprof is preparing to launch AlloFlo, which, thanks to artificial intelligence, acts as a “virtual tutor” with primary and secondary students. The company hopes its new tool, which is still being tested, will support teachers in some of their tasks.

The AlloFlo conversational agent was developed in recent months by Google Cloud Platform and Montreal firm Moov AI. It aims to help students overcome their academic difficulties by engaging in written dialogues in the form of question and answers.

“A student has a question and there are no other students or teachers there to answer. A tool like AlloFlo does not leave the student alone. We want them to be able to get personalized help at any time and for this help to be immediate,” says Jean-Francois Pilon, Director of Technologies, Products and Agility at Alloprof.

To this day, Quebec students can get explanations for their answers on the Alloprof website, especially by contacting a teacher affiliated with the organization or in the support zone.

With AlloFlo, the student can go to and open the institution's website in no time Chatbot To ask your question regardless of the subject. The conversation agent uses digital educational content created by experts on the Alloprof site by providing a summary of the material and inviting them to answer the question and consult the sheet in question. The conversational robot can automatically understand the user's intentions and quickly find the most relevant answers for the student, according to descriptions on the Alloprof website.

“We don't just want to give an answer, we want support, we help them to understand. If we can provide an intelligent, stimulating, caring, fair agent who can respond appropriately to the basic educational needs of students, that will be a great achievement for us,” he said.

Support for teachers

When the province is affected by teacher shortages, AlloFlo's virtual tutor could be part of the solution, Mr. Pilon said.

“What we see is that we have about 1 million students in Quebec, we will never have enough teachers to answer 1 million questions at the same time. In our naive thinking, we want to allow each student to have their own personalized tutor. And that's a clear need,” he said. Said.

Start in June

The organization must finalize the creation of the tool and ensure the reliability of the product. All should be officially online next June.

“We need to ensure accuracy. There are specific issues with, among other things, how we deliver mathematics. Because machine 1 to 23, if we get it wrong it looks like 1-2-3, so we're finalizing the final quality assurance. We don't want to mislead the student,” added Mr Pilon.

According to company statistics, last year, 550,000 students benefited from Alloprof's support services. “We want to go to the next step now,” he says.